27 February 2014 5:48 PM

One of the saddest things about modern British political life is that so few major figures know or care about history, or about the real nature of power. We flounder around in our ‘War Picture Library’ world, in which mighty Britain won the war single-handed for the cause of justice with a loyal and generous Uncle Sam at our side.

We delude ourselves that our survival (largely through the politeness of others) on such bodies as the UN Security Council and the various G-thises and G-thats on which we sit, actually means that we are still rich and important, as our spavined, eviscerated economy hurtles downhill, powered only by gravity, towards a terrible and unavoidable smash.

We maintain a ludicrous and vastly costly nuclear weapon, unusable under any circumstances and far bigger than any conceivable enemy we may face. The only nations against which it might be used are simply not interested in us. It is a form of vanity to imagine that they are.

But out of our old and polished box of antique Edwardian playthings, we can still fetch the beautiful toy soldiers and play-room castles, bequeathed to us by our ancestors, to impress foreign visitors – or, in the case of Mrs Angela Merkel, to make us think we are impressing them.

Does anyone really think that Frau Merkel cares much for these things? She is not a tourist. Modern Berlin is quite an impressive city, especially since it was a flattened ruin 70 years ago but what is far more impressive is the extraordinary level of wealth, the high standards of public service, education and competence, the wisely managed economy (with some notable exceptions) which stretch across the Federal Republic of Germany. True, the Germans cannot quite manage our levels of ceremony and architecture, and no longer possess a monarchy, but they have other things we lack, which make up for this in their own minds. And in any case they recognise that their country’s specially terrible recent history requires, for the foreseeable future, a low-key and restrained approach to power and pomp.

The ridiculous expectations of Mrs Merkel’s visit, drummed up by the Tories, do make me laugh. Do they really still not understand that the EU never gives back the powers it has gathered in, because that is the whole point of it? Do they really still not grasp that Germany has abandoned national glory and imperial power in exchange for a different dream, of a Europe in which Germany dominates everything but never raises her voice or actually asserts her power in public?

If Britain wants to be part of that, Germany will be polite to us, even flatter us, and allow us various trinkets and tokens to soothe those who still like to think we were the victors of 1945. But the great sausage machine of ever-closer-union will continue to mince up the gristly and bony remains of national sovereignty, and turn them into the smooth, bland, pink paste of ‘Unity in Diversity’, with which the Euro-Sausage is so tightly packed. If Britain seeks to be a serious obstacle to the sausage-machine, then she will be crushed, overborne in the Commission, slapped down in the Luxembourg Court, regulated to death and eventually compelled to accept total submission by joining the Euro and abolishing what remains of her national borders, and signing the Schengen agreement with trembling fingers as her new masters look on, smiling benevolently.

The German government was apparently so alarmed by the ridiculous suggestions in the British media (that Mrs Merkel would somehow be David Cameron’s ally in a great return of lost powers to the individual nations) that ti was thought necessary to slap this down hard and fast today.

So, in the part of Mrs Merkel’s speech delivered in English, these words could not have been clearer:

‘Some expect my speech to pave the way for a fundamental reform of the European architecture which will satisfy all kinds of alleged or actual British wishes. I am afraid they are in for a disappointment.’

The qualification which followed was, by comparison, tricky and ambiguous: ‘Others are expecting the exact opposite and they are hoping that I will deliver the clear and simple message here in London that the rest of Europe is not prepared to pay almost any price to keep Britain in the European Union. I am afraid these hopes will be dashed.’

You need to read it several times. Boiled down, it might be thought to mean ‘the rest of Europe *is* prepared to pay almost any price to keep Britain in the European Union’.

At least, that is what I think it is sort of saying. But in fact she said that she would disappoint those who thought she would say ‘the rest of Europe is *not* prepared to pay almost any price to keep Britain in the European Union.’

Which is not quite the same. Of course Germany wants to keep Britain in the European Union. The departure of any major member, even a broke and uncooperative member in the process of physical disintegration, would be a blow to the organisation as a whole. The EU would lose our huge net contribution (a major factor in our economic decline). It would be compelled to give us good terms, in case by erecting tariff barriers it lost our valuable market for its goods. By giving a non-member such terms it would make membership less attractive to others. Long-term plans for a unified European foreign and defence policy would be seriously set back. The EU’s pet ‘Anglo-Saxon’ nation, Ireland (that’s the EU view, not my own description), would be placed in an awkward position. So would an ‘independent’ Scotland. Then there would be the loss of valuable fishing grounds, and many other little details.

But the German Embassy in London, and the London correspondents of the German media, must be doing a very bad job if anyone in Berlin seriously thinks that Britain is about to leave. No important political party favours it. No significant newspaper favours it. The fabled referendum (which I suspect would not be binding on Parliament anyway) has in any case been pledged by a party which cannot hope to win a UK general election.

No, we are going through a repeat of the Dance of Death which Harold Wilson conducted round the capitals of the then EEC in 1974 and 1975, ‘renegotiating’ the terms on which we had joined. Of course, he did no such thing. All the really bad things, from the Common Agricultural Policy to the Fisheries robbery to the steady, relentless theft of sovereignty which has been going on ever since, were unchanged. Just as they will be if Mr Cameron ever attempts to repeat it.

There are only two genuine, honest positions any politician can take on the EU. You can either be in, or you can be out. If you are in, the full package will always apply. If you are not, you can make your own terms. ‘Euroscepticism’ is a delusion. No such political position actually exists. It is made entirely out of wind, and written on water.

I won’t here go into the subject in much more depth. ‘That fine book ‘The Great Deception’, by Christopher Booker and Richard North (Continuum) , is the essential reading for any who are seriously interested in the matter. Anyone who hasn’t read it simply isn’t qualified to discuss the matter, and it is amazing how many MPs and journalists still have not read it, and do not know the simple basics of the controversy.

But I would just like to comment on Mrs Merkel’s statement that it was inconceivable that any EU member could go to war with another. This is another version of the repeated claim that the EU has somehow prevented war by existing. What it really means is that the EU has reversed Carl von Clausewitz’s old dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means ( how many people know that the great strategist features as a minor character in one of C.S.Forester’s ‘Hornblower’ books – ‘The Commodore’, I think ?).

The EU is the continuation of war by other means. Germany has quite rightly learned that its Mitteleuropa ambitions to dominate central and eastern Europe, as set out in 1915 by Friedrich Naumann ( not a drum-beating militarist but a liberal, ancestor of today’s FDP), could not and should not be achieved by conquest, as Ludendorff and Hitler had sought to do.

Yet Germany’s power must find a way to express itself. This it has done by ruthlessly repressing its nationalistic, militarist past and – to its enormous credit - becoming a state of laws and of reason. But at the same time it has dominated the European Union, neutralised France by flattering and subsidising her, allowed the Low Countries and Scandinavia plenty of nominal independence in return for sacrificing the real foundations of sovereignty. Some of its leaders , notably the clumsy Helmut Kohl, have come close to hinting that anyone who gets in the way of this process risks war. This is not a threat, but, as far as such people are concerned, a statement of fact.

Germany must expand and dominate, as a tree must grow. If we do not do this the easy way, then it is reasonable to suppose we must do it the hard way, and who would want to face that for a third time? Coudkl Europe survive it? And of course many countries have willingly taken the EU yoke, scared and battered by the risky, rackety ‘self-determination’ of the 1918-1939 period. They and their peoples often welcome it. Who can blame them. Sovereign borders, the responsibilities of self-defence and alliances, the awkward problems of living, powerless, between the titans of Moscow and Berlin, has persuaded many that they are better off as caressed vassals under Germany’s gentle but insistent domination.

I don’t myself think Britain was in that position. I think our differences with the rest of Europe are so great (especially in law and liberty) that we could never have fitted in this post-modern ironic empire, without losing oyur national soul. What a pity we now lack the strength, wealth or will to get out of it, and so must rot away and disintegrate until we are forgotten.

But I can see why the others are happy to stay. Why should EU countries go to war with each other? They have already willingly accepted defeat in a war without guns and bombs.

But this is not quite so sweet and easy when it moves into such areas as the former Yugoslavia, or Ukraine. Here, we move into places where the Mitteleuropa experiment was never so successful, and where Russian resistance, which defeated it twice in bitter war, remains strong. The abiding memory of Stalingrad (now revived in a new film) , far more than Dunkirk or D-Day, makes Russia determined to maintain her independent position. History, which Russian politicians tend to know, makes them sensitive about German/EU influence in Belgrade or Kiev. I am puzzled that Berlin, so sensible and so civilised in its behaviour towards the rest of Europe, has such a tin ear when it reaches east of the Rivers Bug and Dniester.

Footnote: I cannot resist these two quotations from a column by Al Johnson, Mayor of London, in the ‘Daily Telegraph and referring to Mrs Merkel:

In the first, printed in the newspaper on Monday, he said ‘…she is proof that centre–Right parties can win absolute majorities’ .

In the current website version he says :‘..she is proof that centre-Right parties can win elections’ .

Mrs Merkel, famously I thought, has never won an election outright, and currently governs in a coalition with the Social Democrats, Germany’s union-dominated Labour Party. It is in fact very rare for any German party to win an outright majority. I am interested as to how such a mistake came to be a) made and b) published. We all make mistakes. I certainly do. But this is an especially interesting one. Did someone want to believe something? It's the source of most mistakes.

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14 November 2013 11:48 AM

I have selected two responses to the Grammar School article for comment – the first (from Mr Mckay) interesting, and the second, (from Christopher Charles), tedious and serially unresponsive.

Firstly, here is Joe Mckay:

‘I have asked this question for years. Never got a good response. What does a grammar school offer that a comprehensive school (that channels classes into 'top', 'middle' and 'bottom' sets) doesn't? Is hanging around the 'thick' kids on the playground during lunch enough to cause bright kids to fall behind? Is this the key difference between Grammar and schools and Comprehensives? Or is it the traditions of the school which filter through to the kids via osmosis? I am just curious as to what the key difference is?’

I suspect there are several elements here. The first is a simple one of ethos and authority, greatly affected by size. Grammar schools, because their intake is almost all capable of ‘A-level ‘ study, do not need to be as physically big as Comprehensives to sustain a viable Sixth Form , or whatever the final two years of pre-university study are now called. The personal authority of the Head is therefore more easily imposed through direct presence and contact.

Next, almost every parent is in alliance with the staff to attain the same end, whereas this alliance is far weaker in comprehensives.

But I suspect the strongest element is that the nature of the Grammar School is conservative, hierarchical, traditional and authoritarian, whereas the nature of the comprehensive is radical, anti-authoritarian, discovery-based rather than pedagogical. This used to be, and to much lesser extent still is, enforced though architecture and ceremony, honours boards, teachers wearing gowns and mortar boards, classrooms arranged in rows, ‘houses’ and other public school devices for creating loyalties and identifiable peer groups. Above all, the mixing of the social classes takes place on the understanding that it is desirable to become middle class. Those supporters of Comprehensives who claim that they favour the mixing of the classes *as such* are not being truthful. They favour this mixing only if the middle classes are encouraged to become less so, and to adopt the patois and attitudes of their working-class fellow pupils.

In the early comprehensive era, this division was nothing like as obvious, as many of the first comprehensives, in the 1950s and early 1960s, continued to maintain strong discipline, to have teachers in gowns and mortar-boards, religious daily assemblies, houses and so forth.

The difference only really became apparent when the huge expansion of teacher training launched by the Wilson government changed the nature of the teaching profession (incredibly, the Daily Telegraph, not the Guardian, used to be the favourite newspaper of teachers, and the one in which teaching posts were mainly advertised).The paradox of this, of course, is that many of the new radical teachers were grammar-school products. Also the general cultural revolution made it very hard for large, inner-city comprehensives to maintain the old traditions. A single charismatic head could achieve a great deal, but as soon as he or she moved on, the chaotic nature of the comprehensive system took over. My point is that the grammar school idea is institutionally effective, and will produce reasonable results even with mediocre personnel. The Comprehensive idea (being political, not educational, at root) is institutionally defective and will only work (after a fashion) when exceptional people are in charge, or exceptional circumstances, such as various forms of covert selection, apply.

But the grammar school’s morally and socially conservative nature is one of the reasons why the Left hate these institutions so.

Now to Christopher Charles, who says (as if this tired boilerplate is some new-minted piece of brilliant and original thinking) :

‘The two words that don't crop up in PH's post are 'secondary modern'. The type of school to which 75% of pupils would go if PH's ideas were to prevail. He seems to concern himself only with the 25% that will benefit; the rest seemingly can go hang. Understand this: I am very unhappy with the way most schools are currently run. But that has nothing to do with their status. I'm unhappy because teachers simply aren't allowed to teach. The stultifying national curriculum has drained all the enthusiasm out of the profession. Kids today are just items that have to be processed. And we wonder why so many of them hate it. I would also like to ask PH [for the umpteenth time because I've yet to receive a properly thought out response] exactly how any political party is going to push through a measure [the reintroduction of Grammar Schools] that is only going to benefit a quarter of the population? Political parties are often corrupt and stupid, but they rarely seek to commit electoral suicide. How would PH sell it to the voters? [If PH is simply going to claim that he's 'right' and leave it at that, then I'm afraid that doesn't constitute an answer. He might be happy to defend elitism on this blog. Try doing it in a party political broadcast.]’

I cannot say how many times I have rebutted these points. I cannot understand how Mr Charles can have missed all these rebuttals, though his contribution is written as if I had never made them, and makes no attempt to respond to them. This, then, is the last time I shall trouble to reply to him on this or another matter unless he shows some sign of engaging with what I say.

I will be very simple.

1.Destroying the grammar schools did not make the Secondary Moderns better.

2.On the contrary, it condemned many people who had previously had an escape route from this, to a Secondary Modern education.

3.A large number of modern comprehensives are without doubt worse than the Secondary Moderns they replaced, in terms of discipline, educational attainment , teaching quality, bullying and disorder, etc. If we were able to judge them by a constant measure, rather than through the inflated and worthless examination certificates of modern Britain, this would be quite obvious.

4.Thus, the supposed concern of the ‘Wot about the Secondary Moderns. Eh? Eh? Eh?’ claque is entirely false. They don’t really care about the educational fate of the poor. They just display their phoney woe to obscure the fact that their ideology demands the destruction of good schools. Who can blame them? It is (unsurprisingly) embarrassing for them to acknowledge that their beliefs have had such a stupid and wasteful outcome, and have hurt the poor people whom they claim to champion.

Rather than have the academically-able minority provided with good schools, they condemn the bright children of the poor to hopelessness.

5. I have many times said, and here repeat, that the 1944 system was in need of reform. I just don’t accept that Circular 10/65 was the right reform. Here are several reforms which would have been valuable, and which would not have destroyed hundreds of fine and irreplaceable schools.

1. A more even provision of grammar schools throughout the country.

2.More girls’ grammar schools

3. The building and staffing of the technical schools envisaged in the 1944 Act so that such schools were available in every part of the country.

4. A more flexible test for grammar school entry, as applied in Germany.

All these could have been achieved well within the enormous budgets expended on going comprehensive, and the subsequent vast expenditure on education in this country, which largely still cannot , in eleven years of full-time education, produce people who can read, write and count.

AS to how a political party can get such a proposal past a general election, just give me a political party, a general election, and let me try. How can anyone claim that giving a good education to the poor benefits only those who win places in selective schools? A better-educated country which refuses to waste its talents as we do, is better for everyone in it – its people are more civilised, its services more efficient, its sciences more alive and inventive, its industries more successful, its media and its political class better informed and wiser.

(I will also re-run here the old Randolph Churchill joke which so well illustrates the nature of this question. News was brought to Evelyn Waugh that Randolph Churchill was in hospital for the removal of a non-malignant tumour. Waugh remarked ‘How typical of the medical profession to rummage through the entire vast body of Randolph Churchill, find the one thing in it that is not malignant, and remove it.’

Much the same could be said of the education reformers who examined our school system in 1965, located the one part of it that was working well, and smashed it to pieces).

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08 October 2012 6:43 PM

Time to expand on my column point that British Rail still exists. How do I know? Because the Transport Department tells me so. My discovery came because of my preoccupation (rude people would call it an obsession) with the all-but-abandoned railway line between Oxford and Cambridge.

I am fascinated by this line . It is an amazingly useful strategic piece of track. It is (or it was) the only significant East-West railway link in Southern England, a double-track line linking (or easily able to link) all the main lines out of London (the Great Western Paddington line at Oxford, the Great Central Marylebone line at Bicester or Verney, the Euston London Midland line at Bletchley, the St Pancras Midland line at Bedford, the King’s Cross Line at Sandy , and the Liverpool Street line at Cambridge. It even links ( and in this case still does ) with the Bicester Military railway, a fascinating appendix of our railway system on which I have never travelled.

Properly strengthened and maintained it would have been, and would be a hugely useful part of any sensible goods and passenger network, allowing people and freight to avoid London on long cross country journeys. It was also rather picturesque. I still remember the platform at Marsh Gibbon and Poundon, which seemed to have sunk into the Otmoor swamps (readers of C.S.Lewis’s Narnia stories might have half-expected to find that the station master was a Marsh Wiggle, related to Puddleglum), and which was still lit by gas. It rambled through some of the most English parts of England, not spectacular, just quietly handsome. It was hallowed by the fact that C.S.Lewis had used it to travel between his Oxford home and his Cambridge academic duties. And in any case, what could be more sensible than a direct link between these two lovely, serene places, which meant that you had no need of a car to travel from one to the other?

Dr Richard Beeching, the murderer of much of Britain’s railways system did not actually recommend that the Oxford-Cambridge line should be closed . Even he could see the point of it. The decision seems to have been taken by Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister at the time, for reasons which remain unclear. I still think the whole destruction of the national railway heritage in that era, and the involvement of that interesting man, the late Ernest Marples, needs properly explaining.

As was so often the case with 1960s rail closures, a vital section of the line between Bedford and Cambridge was rapidly sold off for development, so rather coincidentally making a complete restoration very difficult and expensive. But up until privatisation, there was still a functioning railway line between Oxford and Bletchley, and on to Milton Keynes. Goods trains ran, and at Christmas there were even occasional shoppers’ specials from Oxford to Milton Keynes ( which tells you as much about Oxford as a shopping centre as it does about the state of the railways).

I went abroad soon after privatisation, and only gradually became aware that this activity had quietly stopped. Oddly, the short Oxford to Bicester line, the first segment of the route, had reopened, and was doing flourishing business carrying commuters and travellers to the Bicester Village shopping centre.

But at Bicester the trains go no further (though there is a plan to link up with the Marylebone line and run direct trains from London to Oxford by the back way, which may well come to pass).

But what about the rest of it? Before John Major stepped in with his unhinged privatisation scheme , we know there was a functioning track. But now there isn’t. In recent years I have done an annual bicycle ride from Oxford to Cambridge, and for part of the way my route follows the old line. And it has gone. There are large sections which are completely overgrown. Level crossings and signals are no more. In some places it is obvious that the track has been lifted (officially or not, I have yet to find out). In others the vegetation is do sense that it hard to see what has happened. What is certain is that an important national asset has been allowed to decay to the point where it would cost many millions to bring it back to what it was before, let alone to raise it to modern standards. I find it hard to believe that it would have made more sense to maintain and develop it, and keep running trains, than to let this happen.

So I asked Network Rail (which I thought controlled all the remaining BR track since Railtrack’s unlamented demise) to explain. At first they were boisterously defensive. Then they came back and said it wasn’t theirs at all, but was still owned by something called British Rail Residuary. Where was this to be found? Why, in the Transport Department. I’ve asked them to explain – they’re preoccupied at the moment with the West Coast Main Line saga, but I will let you know.

It is hard to imagine any serious country allowing such a valuable possession to disappear in this way, and just shows how the British state (which in the past 20 years has spent many millions upgrading roads between Oxford and Cambridge, though it is still a rather horrible journey by car or bus) is uninterested in developing or maintaining a railway network fit for our modern needs.

**By the way, I am aware of noisy 'plans' to rebuild and reopen this line. These plans have been discussed for years. I will believe them when the money to implement them is allocated, and when work starts

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02 May 2012 4:57 PM

Reports suggest that Anthony Blair may be planning a return to British domestic politics, perhaps as a member of the new, elected (ie Party Machine-selected and controlled) Senate. I can only assume that this is because of the undiluted success of his mission to the Middle East, which has clogged up the best rooms in the pleasantest hotel in Jerusalem for ages, if nothing else.

Can this possibly be? Could he even return to mainstream politics? He ruined everything he touched, demeaned public life, bankrupted the country, did direct and severe damage to English liberty and repeatedly started grandiose wars. Yet somehow he has never been as hated and despised as he might have been expected to be.

All that loathing, mysteriously was directed at Gordon Brown, who performed the role of the Portrait in the (unwritten) novella ‘The Picture of Anthony Blair’, which perhaps I should write, in pastiche of the over-rated Mr Wilde.

Odder things have happened in life than a Blair return. Few of my generation believed that Harold Wilson would ever come back after his defeat in 1970 (Wilson himself probably couldn’t believe it himself) and yet he did, four years after he had been written off. Michael Heseltine came within inches of seizing Downing Street, long after he had walked out of the cabinet over the Westland affair. Chris Patten, that soppy liberal of soppy liberals, has had many incarnations. Winston Churchill, zig-zagging from one party to another and back again, had even more ( and his example should eb recalled by all those who jeer at MPs who change sides. If it’s so wrong, then it was wrong for Churchill too).

Sir Alec Douglas-Home, after what was generally counted a failed stint as Prime Minister (though I’m not so sure it was so bad, really) returned later to be an admired and liked Foreign Secretary. In a way this was his second return. As Lord Dunglass, he had been Neville Chamberlain’s bag-carrier and understrapper during the Munich affair of 1938. Roy Jenkins came back from being an EU Commissioner to become a leader of the SDP, an entirely new career, though he wasn’t much more loved by his colleagues in his new role than he had been in the past. I’ve often wished that Denis Healey could make a comeback, as one of the few grown-ups in British politics, but it’s too late now. Abroad, General de Gaulle returned from political extinction. But all these people are far more considerable than the Blair creature, whose role is being quite adequately filled by his self-proclaimed heir, Mr Cameron.

I’ve always been amazed by the way that Mr Blair’s showbusiness, Diana-like sparkle bypassed the normal mental faculties of voters – basic intelligence, reason, caution, experience, common sense. I knew him (slightly) before he was famous, and while I could see that his shiny blandness was an electoral asset, I never liked it or imagined that it betokened a real change. When I managed to speak to him (or when I talked to others who had spent longer with him), it was always amazing to find how incoherent, ill-informed and relaxed he was, as if his political career was swirling around him, leaving him personally untouched. It was happening to him, like unexpected stardom, not controlled or particularly desired by him. It wasn’t that he didn’t like it. He liked it a lot, but more in the way of a successful actor ( as I believe he was) than of a man committed to the struggle for the highest office.

Unlike most politicians, whose first interest is power, and who are often bored by luxury, Mr Blair always seemed to be more interested in the fun, glamour and first-class travel side of the political world.

I wonder if, like so many people who have enjoyed fame, he just misses it so much that he wants it back. Fame and prominence are like stimulant drugs to many, making their eyes brighter, compelling them to stand up straighter and live more intensely. My brother once arranged an interview of Sir Oswald Mosley for a pilot programme (not usually shown) of a current affairs series on which he worked, back in the 1970s. He always remembered how the old monster came shuffling into the studio, rheumy-eyed and stooping, a nearly-decrepit man in the twilight of his days. But as they fussed round him, testing the lights and microphones and applying the make-up, Sir Oswald asked if there was any possibility that the interview might actually be shown. There wasn’t, but my brother thought it sensible to pretend that it might be.

Almost instantly, Mosley shrugged off a couple of decades of age, sat up straighter, reacted more quickly. His eyes began to shine, his voice and mind to sharpen. He gave a cogent interview.

When it was all over, he sagged back into his original self and shuffled off into the South Bank drizzle and the obscurity he had long ago earned.

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17 October 2011 10:39 AM

For me, the 15th October is always a date to be remembered. Not to be recalled with any special pleasure, rather the opposite. But definitely one to be marked. The more I examine the recent history of our country, the more the 15th October 1964 seems to me to be a dividing line between one sort of Britain and another.

For it was on that day that Labour won the 1964 election by an eighth of an inch, and so we entered the age of Harold Wilson, the most underestimated Prime Minister of modern times. By underestimated I don’t mean that people are wrong, if they recall him at all, to think of him as a rather shallow chancer without many redeeming qualities. By the standards of his time he was a pretty unscrupulous creature, especially when set against his rival, Alec Douglas-Home, a gentleman if ever there was one.

I once served under a political editor of the Daily Express, in the days when it still sold two million copies a day and had some standing, who was a man of great experience and wisdom and on first-name terms with most of the leading politicians of the day.

‘All Prime Ministers go mad’, he would say. ‘It would be kinder to take them out and shoot them when they retire, like injured horses’. He had two exceptions to this rule. One was Alec Douglas-Home, who remained level-headed and sane till the day he died; and the other was James Callaghan, a premier for whom I find I have more and more time the more I know about him.

Maybe if Callaghan, rather than Roy Jenkins, had been Home Secretary in the middle years of the Wilson Government, the great permissive society revolution of 1964-70 would not have happened, or would have been far more restrained. He only took over this post after the early reforming frenzy was over. He certainly is the only major Labour politician to have spoken explicitly against the permissive society, while resisting (alas unsuccessfully) the Wootton Report on Cannabis in January 1969. He was also genuinely concerned about the decay of state education, being permanently embittered by his own failure to get to university, entirely because his family were too poor.

For it was Jenkins, in alliance with a crew of socially and culturally liberal Tories, who revolutionised the country. Incidentally, it was that same cross-party alliance –which has now taken over all three parties – that ditched the laws against pornography and got us into what was then the Common Market. Roy Jenkins is the father not only of the SDP, and of New Labour, but also of the ‘modernised’ Tory Party which now sits so happily in coalition with Jenkins’s own party.

The thing was that the Jenkins revolution happened just as the fabric of the country was changing too. Tower blocks and motorways were being built. Ocean liners were being scrapped. Jet planes were beginning to be common. Steam engines and railway branch lines were disappearing. Bus-conductors were being abolished. Public phone boxes were being modernised and direct dialling introduced; primary schools were chucking out their stern old rows of desks; people were starting to buy imported cars in large numbers; colour TV began. As I look back now on my own childhood, 1964 offers a clear dividing line between one sort of country – in which I had been brought up much as a child might have been brought up in the 1930s , and the utterly transformed place in which I would experience adolescence.

It smelt, felt and looked quite different. And, as I often say, it is my great good fortune to have seen personally the world that existed before, so that nobody can lie to me about it – and also so that I know what was wrong with it, and don’t idealise it. I did actually see small boys, the same age as me, diving for big old copper pennies in the mud of Portsmouth Harbour near the Gosport Ferry. And I mean diving, they went head first into the slime and came up coated in it. What is most striking about this memory is that they looked perfectly happy in their disgusting occupation, and that passers-by, as they chucked their pennies into the mud, thought it all perfectly normal.

Like the whiff of coal-smoke, or the occasional sight of a mainline express steam excursion, or the glowing window of a proper old-fashioned toyshop on a late winter’s afternoon, walking up the ramp of the old Gosport Ferry ( as I did quite recently) and hearing the whoop of its hooter can trigger that extraordinary mixture of memories, including the disgusting food we used to eat (or in my case not eat), the unsatisfactory washing arrangements, the brutal dentistry and the perpetual stink of tobacco, or the gusts perfumed with stale beer that came out of the dark and faintly sinister pubs around Portsmouth Hard ( whatever happened to Brickwood’s Brilliant Ales?).

And oddly enough I can remember the dark early morning of 16th October 1964, in a chilly prep-school dormitory on the edge of Dartmoor, when the result of the Wilson election still wasn’t clear, and hearing the burble of the radio from one of the masters’ rooms, and knowing that something momentous was going on, and being excited by it. I was right to be excited. But I might also have been a bit more worried than I was.

Would it all have happened anyway? Would the Tories, had they won, have wrecked the grammar schools and launched the permissive society? Quite possibly. But then again, quite possibly not, or not as quickly. But the railways would have been ripped up, and the concrete blocks built (that had already begun), and I expect someone would have banned the Portsmouth Mudlarks too. But my life, and a lot of other lives, might have been very different. Labour governments in this country generally *make* radical changes. Tory governments *accept* those changes, but only rarely do they embark on destructive urges of their own. If we had had a Japanese-style permanent rule by one dominant party, we might be a bit better off. Not much, but a bit.

Some Conversation

I’m sticking with Amnesty for a while longer, because it still fulfils an important purpose – the Libya report being an example of that – which nobody else can or will do. Of course I recognise its severe imperfections and actual wrong doing, by my own standard. But I haven’t time to mount an internal political challenge to these policies, and I’m not sure that if I did have the time I’d much care to use it that way. The good that they do outweighs the harm. I am free to criticise them while being a member. It is all part of the age-old problem of how one can engage with the world. Either you are too pure to act at all; or you are so involved in the wickedness world that you become part of it. Somewhere between these two poles lies the narrow pathway we ought to tread.

I feel for Mr Doyle in his argument with Mr ‘Bunker’. I will refrain from taking sides in their dispute (Mr Doyle does seem to me to be more scientifically informed than most contributors here, but maybe that is because he has not met his match on the evolutionist side. I’m not qualified to say. And, by the way, I’m still waiting for the reply from Mr ‘Crosland’ to my childlike questions on the subject, submitted to him in August).

But Mr ‘Bunker’ has an absolutely infuriating style of debate, made all the worse by the self-congratulatory tone of it (and the self-congratulatory character of his pseudonym, fortunately undermined by the demonstrable fact that if anyone debunks him he doesn’t notice it has happened). He simply will not stick to defined terms, and at the slightest whiff of any attempt to pin him down, he will squirt ink into the water like a nervous octopus. I would say to Mr ‘Bunker’ that his contributions would be a lot more interesting to other readers, and a lot more educational for him, if he would try to correct these faults. I personally would rather eat a plate of congealed tapioca than engage with him again.

Mr Cunningham asks ‘Cannot Peter Hitchens understand the consequences of turning a blind eye to politicians who behave inappropriately in either private life or public life (and the two are always linked in some way). No matter how ’trivial’ Mr Hitchens may think Liam Fox’s transgressions are, to ignore them, or worse, to actively discourage the press from investigating them, would embolden (some of) our politicians to engage in corruption far worse than anything hinted at in the Dr Fox case.’

Well, yes, Peter Hitchens can, I can’t see where I’ve said I’m against the press in general pursuing these things. I’m just expressing a personal regret that I was diverted by such stuff in the Clinton years. Morality, as I say sometimes, is for me. My only wider moral purpose is to help create the conditions in which other people can make the right moral choices, or at least aren’t pressured to take the wrong ones. I’m talking about what I think I shouldn’t have done, not what other people should or shouldn’t do. In fact I can make an argument (and have done) for such exposures. And I am sure there will be people who are happy to pursue them. Newspaper offices contain many different kinds of people.

On the Clinton matter, people who ought to have been pursuing more serious matters got obsessed with Mr Clinton’s trousers. One result of this was that they thought they could destroy a bad liberal Presidency through scandal. And, when they failed, they had prepared no other weapons. They should have been developing a proper conservative alternative, not hoping for a mixture of reheated Reaganism and patriotic waffle to do the trick. Similar, but not identical criticisms should be levelled at the conservative media in Britain during the Blair period, constantly chasing after individual scandal, never grasping what New Labour was really about, and shrivelling in the end into a pathetic and hysterical personal attack on Gordon Brown, who for all this thousand faults, was the man who saved the Pound Sterling, along with the equally maligned Ed Balls.

Mr Cunningham also says on the Fox matter : ‘I wonder if Mr Hitchens’ lack of interest in exposing the transgressions of Liam Fox has something to do with the fact he (Dr Fox) is on the Right of the Conservative Party and is also strongly sympathetic to the Zionist cause.’

No it doesn’t. I don’t care who’s in the cabinet of a government I despise. And I long for the collapse of the Conservative Party. I suspect Mr Cunningham is new here. Dr Fox’s idea of ‘right wing’ and mine are quite different. I am not, as Dr Fox is, a Thatcherite economic liberal. Indeed, I’m not a Thatcherite at all and have no plans to invite her to my birthday party (this is a joke, by the way. She wouldn’t come if I did. Apart from anything else, she knows I once had a beard, and gave me a steely disapproving look when I tried to escape from one of her interminable harangues on board her personal plane back in the 1980s. I thought she’d finished. She had in fact just paused for breath. I half-rose from my cramped seat, bottom in the air as I got ready to be the first out. She glared at me so ferociously I thought my trousers would catch fire, and so I meekly sat down again and endured another half hour).

I hadn’t even realised Mr Fox had Zionist sympathies until the recent revelations. And it doesn’t make any difference now I do know. The British government definitely doesn’t have any such sympathies, whatever any individual minister may think, and it won’t unless and until Israel discovers a lot, and I mean a lot, of oil. Mind you, the recent gas discoveries off Haifa may test that proposition, eventually.

I wish to record my gratitude to Mr Stephenson for doing the spadework and responding devastatingly to silly allegations made against Sir Winston Churchill. I am myself critical of Churchill, as I think anyone has to be in hindsight, but the idea that his mind, tongue and pen were for sale is absurd.

A small piece of good news: Those of you who like to do your own research may be pleased to know that if you put the words ‘Millbank Systems’ into any good search engine, you will arrive at a wonderful new online version of Hansard, which puts many decades of important debates at your fingertips.

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04 November 2009 11:26 AM

I really don't know why people get diverted into futile demands for referendums on the EU issue, or on anything else for that matter. Referendums have many things wrong with them. They only work in genuine democracies such as Switzerland where the electors, not the authorities, decide what questions should be asked, how and when. And even poor Switzerland is now exhausted by the number of votes it has had to hold.

They don't bind governments to accept them, and can be held again and again until they come up with the answer the government wants. The question can be skewed (just as in opinion polls) to obtain the result the government wants. There are, in Britain, no rules about how they are to be held. In 1975, the Government took sides, and the entire print media were in favour of a 'Yes' vote. You can imagine how the BBC treated it. That referendum was only held to get Harold Wilson off the hook, because his Labour Cabinet was so divided against itself.

In the unlikely event of a 'No' vote, I imagine Mr Wilson would have gone off to Brussels and negotiated a few more empty 'opt-outs' and concessions, and then held the vote again.

No, the only way out of the EU for Britain is the election to government of a party committed in its manifesto to withdraw.

That party needs to accept, and state, that this is an issue of principle. Does this country control its own destiny, or not? It cannot do so in a political structure specifically designed to drain sovereignty from national governments.An election held with this as a major issue would at last compel the pro-EU factions to explain their intentions or desires, or damage themselves by refusing to do so. It would also make it clear that Britain could easily exist outside the EU, having good relations with it but not subject to Commission directives or the Luxembourg Court.

Only if such a party existed, and was prepared to argue this, would the debate about 'Europe' shift from its present fatuous, babyish level about 'scepticism' and 'negotiating the return of powers'. 'Scepticism' is a meaningless position, summed up as 'opposition to the EU in opposition, support for it in office'. What exactly has become of the 'Sceptic' hero Daniel Hannan MEP during the collapse of the Tory Party policy on Lisbon? As for 'return of powers' it is as likely that the Titanic will be raised, and Mr Cameron knows it. Why do people dare to mouth this drivel?

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23 October 2009 11:14 AM

I'm saving my thoughts on Nick Griffin's Question Time appearance for my MoS column, to be published on Sunday, but will say here that I do not think that the BNP have gained anything from his performance, and may well have been severely damaged.

I do sometimes wonder about some of the anonymous contributors here. Do they read the things they comment on? After my posting on what I shall in future call the K&C smear, a person styling himself or herself 'anonymous', wrote: ‘Quite right, Mr Hitchens. If someone has made some regrettable view in the past, and rejected it, then others should never mention it again.’ Apart from being semi-literate (how does one 'make' a view?), this had absolutely nothing at all to do with what I had said. I didn't ask for my past to be kept secret. On the contrary. I said people should stop telling lies about it. How can one respond to what was obviously intended as sarcastic sneering, but didn't even qualify as that?

On other comments about this: Mr Barclay says Michael Portillo's liking for Harold Wilson means that he, like me, was on the Left in his youth. Hardly. Enthusiasm for Harold Wilson doesn't really put anyone on the Left. The Left (I remember it well) despised Harold Wilson as a sell-out when he was Labour leader. Few people believe he ever had any personal politics to speak of. Mr Portillo's enthusiasm for Harold Wilson has always seemed to me to suggest that he was, from the start, a professional politician without much in the way of strong opinions himself, happy to accord with the spirit of the age.

Then there was an irritating post from Mike Barnes, saying he was disturbed by my ‘willingness to state quite openly that you are in a constant flux as regarding political affiliations. Whilst I understand people do tend to modify their political outlook throughout their lives. You seem to be uncomfortable with your position almost daily and throughout your political life have moved somewhat more than most.’

That's not my understanding. I was a teenage radical from 1966 to 1969, a signed-up Revolutionary Socialist from 1969 to 1975, a member of the Labour Party from 1977 to 1984, I joined the Tories in 1997 and left them in 2003. Since then I have argued consistently that the Tory Party was finished and should be abandoned by conservatives. It would be pretty difficult to describe this as 'being uncomfortable with my position almost daily' or as a 'constant flux' without a serious risk of terminological inexactitude. We are dealing with a political journey of more than 40 years, and what seems to me to be a logical progression guided by experience (see my book 'The Broken Compass' for details). I might add that during that time I have had more experience of my own country and the world than most people get, and if experience doesn't change your mind, I really can't see the point of it.

I think Mr Barnes is trying to justify what follows, namely his strange belief that he can have no influence over the result of the next election, which he appears to accept has been decided for him in advance by a media claque. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy if enough people fall for it, but not if they don't. Actually, if there is a Cameron government, which I still believe there may well not be, I will be ideally positioned to criticise it, unlike all those commentators who have given hostages to fortune in the past three years, loading undeserved praise on Mr Cameron and tying themselves to his chariot. But, alas, the necessary dissolution and replacement of the Tory Party will be postponed if this happens. I can comfort myself that a Cameroon Government will do as much to destroy the Tories as a fourth successive election defeat. I shall continue to pursue the cause of conservative politics.

I regard George Galloway as highly intelligent, an extremely effective public speaker, debater and broadcaster, and seriously wrong on many major domestic and foreign issues, particularly the Israel question.

I must disagree with 'Jimmy R', who says: ‘The Wilson era was the most overrated period of Government until Blair came along.’ This is simply not true. Most historians and commentators viewed it for years as a blank period of economic incompetence and failure to deal with the unions. My word 'momentous' was not intended to suggest approval, but to underline the enormous social and cultural changes which happened under that government, many of which we would have been better off without.

The fact that many of these were achieved through alleged 'Private Members' Bills,' floated through with obvious government support is explored in my book 'The Abolition of Britain'. We are repeatedly told that these Bills were passed on 'free' votes and MPs could vote according to conscience. What were they free from? They were free from any possibility of being punished at a general election for doing something their voters didn't like, since such Bills weren't in party manifestoes or formally linked with the Government. Quite why this is considered conscientious, I don't know.

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19 October 2009 11:28 AM

For those of us with very long memories, last Friday was the 45th anniversary of the day Harold Wilson scraped to victory with a majority of four seats, and I wonder more and more as the years go by what would have happened if he had lost. (Two days before was the 943rd anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which another Harold did lose). The education revolution and the permissive society both came about under Wilson, who also kept Britain out of the Vietnam War and failed to get us into the Common Market.

It was a momentous time, often under-rated by modern historians. Had he narrowly failed in 1964, would a feeble Tory government have lost soon afterwards, allowing Wilson a second chance? Or would a relieved nation have learned to love Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and never have got to know Edward Heath? Had the Tories won, would we be a completely different country? Would there still be hundreds of grammar schools, would divorce be difficult, welfare benefits restricted to those prepared to work, and hanging still be possible? Were those a few short years in which radical change was briefly possible, or would it have come about anyway? The Tories these days are always willing to lie down under left-wing offensives, and have now converted themselves into a wholly unembarrassed radical party. But was it quite the same then?

It was amazing how Mr Wilson converted a majority of four into one of 97 in the astonishing Labour triumph of March 1966, given that his initial period in government wasn't very impressive. Maybe it was because Ted Heath, rather than Alec Douglas-Home, was leading the Tories by then.

Wilson always referred to the previous period of Tory government as 'the Thirteen Wasted Years of Tory Rule', and I rather enjoyed the fact that I was born in October 1951, on the very first day of those 13 wasted years. The notice of my birth in 'The Times of Malta' appeared close to a report of Winston Churchill's new Cabinet, just being formed following his narrow victory over Clement Attlee (Labour got more votes, the Tories more seats, a result that may be reversed next year, if the polls are right). It also noted that he had been to see the King, as we still had one in 1951.

Things which are now receding into the haze of the past, such as the present Queen's Coronation, the Korean War, the Suez affair and the first Sputnik, were still very recent in 1964. Yet it still seemed to be a very modern era, in some ways more frantically modern than our own, which is a little less confident about chucking aside the past and a little less confident about the new always being better than the old. No wonder, given what the sixties brought about.

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01 March 2006 3:40 PM

I can remember Screaming Lord Sutch campaigning for votes at 18 back in the 1960s. He was joking, of course. In those days, nobody except Monster Raving Loonies thought that teen votes were a good idea. A few years later, the absurd Harold Wilson pushed through votes at 18 in the hope of saving his government ( it didn't). This had the frightful side-effect of putting teenagers on juries.

Now we are told that votes at 16 are desirable. Whyever should they be?

Actually, there's a much better argument for raising the voting age - I think 28 would be about right, as by then most people have at least some experience of the important things of life, especially paying tax and taking responsibility for children . The supposed 'idealism' that people praise in the young is almost always idealism at someone else's expense.

And if we brought back the old pre-1914 rule, that nobody who received a public salary or welfare payment could vote, then governments would have to stop trying to bribe people to vote for them by giving them jobs or handouts. Instead they'd have a real reason to keep taxes low and to cut the public payroll. So that won't happen.